special edition of Peripheral ARTeries ~ interview with Karin Edgett
Dear Karin,
We are glad to announce that the new special edition of Peripheral ARTeries is finally out and you can view it at the following official link: https://issuu.com/artpress/docs/biennial.edition.xv
The direct link to your article: https://issuu.com/artpress/docs/biennial.edition.xv/124
Your article is one of the longest ones of this special edition and we hope that everyone will enjoy this special release of our publication.
Kind regards,
Peripheral ARTeries Team
Direct link to the PDF of my article with images
Or read the article below;
Special Issue, Biennial Edition, January 2020
(Text from page 124)
An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator peripheral.arteries@europe.com
Peripheral ARTeries meets Karin Edgett
My journey is a windy path of exploring, shifting and evolving. I spent many years over-working to become something measurable in this society, and in that process denying my health and emotional well-being; but more importantly, restricting my connection to the vast unexplored cosmic connection where true creativity, joy and expansion exist.
"my creations: art ~ food ~ etc., are my journey into light"
I grew up in Erie Pennsylvania, a shrinking and yet charming city. I had four brothers and sisters. My parents were creative, and we spent lots of time outdoors, lake time, snow time, forest time. We embraced industrial foods and never ever talked about how we felt. To briefly summarize my adult life: I received a BFA from Edinboro University, ran my own ad agency for 20 years, was a foster parent and invented a wrist band that monitors your sun exposure; and am now a 'nutritional' cook, artist and light worker. I enjoy dancing, sailing and nature. Food has taken me around the world, helped me heal from a host of chronic conditions, and in later years, has helped me shift more easily usher in a higher vibrational expression. I am a certified nutritional cook and teach cooking techniques and blog recipes I create that I feel will help others do the same.
Art is how I travel in and out of unique understandings, new patterns, new dimensions. My creative process is an unfolding of my need to change; something calling me just outside my current frame of reference. I find it comforting that whenever I am feeling out of alignment, I can paint my way into a new universe, multiverse, collective, light or however it shows up. Poetic words are used throughout my expression to convey a deeper message, they are often channeled and light-inspired. I have several bodies of art that I have been working in that are rather significant. They are 'abstract', 'truth', and 'infinity' . They combine words with art to embody a transformation.
'abstract' was my dive into painting energy; the first step on my journey ~ an exercise in experiencing anything differently. Many of my abstracts are of people and places; but most are experiences in the energy of color and pattern and shape. Their titles contain additional information.
Next, I created my 'truth' project. We question 'truth' when we want to evolve. This series of prints and haiku are my new truth seekers. My brush strokes and colors are captured as imprints; monotypes featuring patterns and movement evocative of shifting ideas. The haiku further untether existing paradigms and provoke evolution of consciousness with whimsy. Each painting has shifted me. 'truth' is a rather potent subject right now. With this project, I invite others to open their hearts and imagination and create our best evolution. These monotypes are in acrylic and other media when necessary. They are all completed on paper, and some have been enlarged and reprinted on archival canvas.
My current project is 'infinity'. Infinity is a series of paintings with haiku or other poetic words and phrases that explore the immense concept of infinity and unleash its potential to usher in a new dimension. The symbol of infinity is mathematical, feminine shaped, universal motion in its expression of all that is, was and will be. For me it begins the process of balancing the feminine with the masculine to usher in a more equitable experience. The poetry or words further express the shifts and expansions taking place. There are now close to 50+ works that are completed from this project. I believe these works to be transformative portals for all that is happening in our universe, on our earth, in our country, our communities and our hearts, right now. The infinity series has subchapters; 'chasing infinity', 'I am infinity', 'angelic infinity' and 'collective infinity'. Some of my works cross over into several subchapters.
Hello Karin and welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit KarinEdgett.art in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production and we would start this interview with a couple of introductory questions. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your BFA in Fine Arts from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, you nurtured your education with workshops and studies: how did those formative experiences - as well as your 30 years long career in the advertising industry - influence your evolution as an artist and help you to develop your attitude to experiment? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum (underlying experiences) direct the trajectory of your current artistic research?
I believe we are all born creators, born free, born to express. However well intended, society, institutions, parents too often prefer a path of "norms". My ability to experiment as an artist, in life required a few main emotional groundings; trust, freedom and safety. I had to learn to trust myself, trust my connection to others and to all that is conceived and not yet conceived. I had to have freedom which often meant financial freedom which buys you time to explore. And, I had to feel safe from judgement internally and externally.
As a young artist, I was drawn to use words or messages in my art. My first piece I remember was with the words "I AM PUT HERE TO BE AND TO BE I WILL".
But to answer your questions directly, it's always been communication, messages, meaning, movement. There was something I didn't know, and these elements were helping me discover it. I was being guided by forces I didn't yet understand.
I studied fine art which was giving me nightmares about becoming a "starving artist". So, I added a study in photography and graphic design which seemed like a better way to make a living. I also added the study of advertising to provide a more complete understanding of the message; the intent, the audience, and the emotion behind the graphics.
Once in the professional field, every client I had required diving deep into their essence to create pertinent messages (now I would know that as a unique energetic vibration). You had to present your ideas fully quantified, but the real ideas and insights came from an unquantified knowing.
I could, from a young age, access answers, and yet somehow was stuck in a society and industry that was more attached to how you saw the answers than the answers themselves. That underlying cultural attachment to process and decorum drove me nuts! I could wait until I could figure out how to be freer in my creative process and yet I still needed validation; money.
There were many things that I did that I didn't know how they would impact me later in life. It was easy to think in terms of putting money in a savings account, you would later have a pile of cash. Experiences are the same. You build them up, and later you have a "whole" expression of you, which keeps evolving as you keep having experiences.
In 2008, I took a leap of faith and sold my agency which I had had for 20 years and simplified my life.
I spent two years playing, traveling, studying healthy food practices, relaxing, evolving, diving into meditation, studying quantum physics, metaphysics, yoga, sailing, dancing, anything that was different and fun. I even partnered with a NASA space scientist and developed a new product that measured personal sun exposure. (This wasn't restful). It was an awesome project, but I found myself stuck between manifesting ideas and quantifying ideas.
However, I was building my confidence in my ability to change, to evolve, to really create. Then I began to paint again, but from a whole new breadth and depth of me.
These are the cultural substratum that directed my path.
The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of Peripheral ARTeries and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article has at once impressed us for the way, especially in your infinity series, you sapiently created such a coherentcombination between rigorous sense of geometry and such unique abstract aesthetics: do you conceive you works instinctively or do you methodically elaborate your pieces? In particular, how important is spontaneity in your artwork.
My art is contemplative in nature. I'm constantly healing, evolving and expanding through it. In my initial abstract series, I began with the intention to paint light spontaneously. By the time I reached the 'infinity' series, I had shifted my consciousness quite a bit. Now I create with purpose in a "channeled" manner. My preferred creative approach is to prepare myself energetically ~ to eat well, meditate and journal ~ setting an intention to create collaboratively with the entirety of the universe. Right before this series, I had changed my diet to plant-based. Plants have a higher energetic vibration, which I used for this particular leap into an untethered infinity.
We have been really fascinated with the way your infinity series unveils the elusive still ubiquitous bond between Math's and Art: how do you consider the relationship between mathematical abstraction and artistic research?
The symbol is mathematical, but one of the most beautiful and charismatic. I was attracted to many of its aspects, including the fact that it has so many mathematical anomalies. Math often prides itself in being a rather "exact" methodology; but introduce infinity, and all its certainty flies out the window! For example, 1+1=2. But 1+00=00. Infinity added to any number is still just infinity. There is just no real definition for infinity, it's relatively more, too much to count, uncountable, unquantifiable, un-math like. :)
One whole other level, the symbol is a double portal to another consciousness. That is the deeper intent in all of these paintings. It is, for me, part of ushering in a newer consciousness, a more equitable being-ness. The infinity is a feminine shape with motion and unity, a symbol of the balance that is needed between the masculine and feminine. The more I unleash its shape, the more motion it has and the stronger the portal or transcendent potential. Some of the infinities took flight taking on an angelic form. Some are traveling in a collective, singularly unique, but not singular or alone.
We have really appreciated the vibrancy of the delicate nuances of that mark out your artistic production and that create tension and dynamics: how does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in a specific artwork in order to achieve such brilliant results?
This is an important question. My colors are a delicate balance of vibrancy and healing. I choose them energetically, to especially soothe and excite. Everything really comes down to an energy signature. We each have our own, and some energy is out of balance. For example, pink is often chosen when I need to heal something in my own heart. It is the vibrating color most associated with love. Blue is a soothing color and presents a calming energy. This question also brings up an interesting point. The energy conveyed at the exact same level from an original painting is rarely duplicated in a copy of that painting.
Your paintings walk the viewers to such an hybrid dimension, providing them with a multilayered visual experience. How do you consider the role of memory, as a crystallization of everyday life's experience playing within your process and how does your daily life fuel your work as an artist?
I like a quote by Ai Wei Wei, "life is art, art is life, I never separate it". The truth is, I'm a creator. That is what I do. Embodying that completely, in everyday life, is one of the biggest shifts you can give yourself. I create with every single breath. I create food that enhances my ability to create art. If I had a magic wand, I think the one thing I would do for this world is to remove the word "work" from our vocabulary and replace it with the word "create".
We like the way you encourage people to elaborate such a variety of interpretations of your artworks: in this sense, we daresay that your artistic practice seems to aim to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception. How important is for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal meanings? And in particular, how open would you like your artworks to be understood?
Viewers come in all forms and for all kinds of reasons. Art in general is an opportunity to travel someplace different than where you currently are. Some art takes you to a bucolic scene of a time long ago. My art is intended to take you to a place you may not have yet conceived. I use the words, often haiku, to guide you along that experience. They work together. If you are not ready to go there, you will not likely be interested in my art.
My deepest goal is just to assist a transformation, first in myself, then in others. We are at a unique crossroads, where we have to work collaboratively on very big important issues that require a new consciousness. I am hoping to help in any way possible to usher in that new consciousness, even in just my own.
With their powerful surrealistic visual quality, your works convey such stimulating abstract feeling, whose background creates such an oneiric atmosphere: how do you consider the role of abstraction as well as the relationship between the real and the imagined playing within your artistic practice?
To me, every observation is an abstraction. It's all energy, it's all shifting and changing. What is perceived by one is not ever exactly the same as perceived by another.
Abstraction is just a path to your own truth. If I wanted to paint an apple to look like an apple, I could, but that would not be my truth, what I can see and feel is so much different than just one aspect of that apple.
Allowing yourself and others to show up abstracted in their own unique way is a true gift and way more fun!
As you have remarked once, your work in the advertising industry has influenced your interest in writing poetry or poetic titles with each painting you create. Your artworks have often long titles, that often conveys subtle message and that allow you to clarify the message while maintaining the element of ambiguity: how do you go about naming your work? In particular, is important for you to tell something that might walk the viewers through their visual experience?
I paint before I write any words, channeling colors and patterns, movement and energy. Once I create the painting, I leave it in my presence for a while, patiently waiting. I usually get an energetic burst of titles after a particularly potent meditation and start writing.
Most of them are haiku, a brilliant construct for creating a deep message with a limited amount of words. Often, I will work them into the paintings, but sometimes they are just there, on the side. The words are meant to have energy, to augment the experience of each painting.
Over the years your artworks have been showcased in several occasions, including your recent solo i am in infinity at Sonoma Cellar, Alexandria Virginia: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? By the way, as the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms – as lnstagram – increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalized audience?
First, my art is created to help myself evolve. Second, if even one other person is assisted in any way by experiencing my art, I am overjoyed! I enjoy "solo" shows because I find my art can make a better energetic impact as a collection. Especially with series like the 'i am infinity". And when I give a talk or presentation, I can speak directly to those who show up, and we all share in the experience.
There is nothing energetically that compares to seeing art in person, or really experiencing anything in person. However, I am a huge fan of social media. I am so excited for the potential for people to share their creativity globally and for people to be able to find commonalities all over the place.
Art is really accessible to everyone. How cool is that? We should embrace change that social media is helping us create, as it is useful and inevitable even if there are a few bumps or skinned knees along the way.
We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Karin.
What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future?
I am actually playing with other mathematical symbols that I believe need to be unleashed from their staid and limited understandings. I've been sketching ideas with no completed works yet. I have also been composing a few books on these subjects.
And I'm ever creating recipes that I hope will be of use to others in shifting their health or energy. Everything I'm doing right now is about shifting energy, accessing information, expanding myself and others.
Shifting energy is often healing, a new path forward, a fresh idea, collaborative and active part of an evolution and expansion. It is very exciting for me to be involved in that sift in whatever way possible.
~ Karin Edgett